3 Tips to Get to Know Your Doctor
Here is a USA Weekend piece on the type of advice I give in Critical Decisions – how to make stronger connections with your doctor.
My cancer journey began when I went to the bathroom and noticed bright red urine. I remember feeling simultaneously shocked because my urine was full of blood and disappointed that I hadn’t felt pain that would signal a benign problem like kidney stones. “Shit,” I thought to myself, “could I have cancer?” Read more here.
Q: Much of the debate around health care reform has centered on whether the government or the individual will control health care decisions. Is that a valid argument? Most medical decisions are between clinicians and their patients, and will continue to be that way as the federal health reform law is implemented. Medicare bureaucrats aren’t…
Just three weeks earlier, she had noticed something strange about one of her breasts. An irregular shape. Her daughter brought her to the doctor, and soon the patient, I’ll call her Amanda, was diagnosed with breast cancer, stage “to be determined.” In fact, she was now in an oncologist’s office, learning what tests she would…
In the ICU, accurate and timely knowledge of patients’ oxygen levels is crucial. But some machines used to assess oxygen levels are less accurate when patients have dark skin tones. Read more here
With health care costs rising, employers (and insurance companies) are increasingly asking consumers (aka “patients”) to have more “skin in the game”—to pay more out of pocket for their medical care. The Kaiser Family Foundation has a nice report on trends in health insurance deductibles. This picture shows the rise in these deductibles. That means:…
Here is a short video introducing one of the themes of Critical Decisions: the challenge of making shared decisions when physicians unwittingly deluge their patients with too much jargon laden information. Feel free to forward the link to your friends.